Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday June 23, 2005 @06:00PM
from the real-simplified dept.

honestpuck writes "It might seem a little strange to associate Cisco Press with a book for newcomers to home networking but Cisco are now the proud owners of Linksys and have a large place in this market. Therefore a book like this may not seem so out of place." Read on for the rest of honestpuck's review.

Home Networking Simplified

author

Jim Doherty, Neil Anderson

pages

416

publisher

Cisco Press

rating

7

reviewer

Tony Williams

ISBN

1587201364

summary

Good book for an absolute beginner

When reviewing this book, the first argument you might have with the authors is exactly where to start. The authors have decided to start earlier than I feel necessary, with hooking your computer up with a dial-up ISP, something most ISPs already provide with more specific detail than can be given in this volume. There are strong arguments for having it all in one place, though, and I have to allow for that in this review.

That said, there are some simplifications and throwaway lines toward the book's beginning that I did feel were unnecessary. A good example is the discussion of bits, bytes, megabytes and gigabytes. Having defined a kilobyte as 1024 bytes, the authors then define a megabyte as 1000 kilobytes. They also claim not to understand why it is 1024 rather than 1000. Either our authors are lying, attempting a poor joke, or they are betraying an unforgivable ignorance of the binary number system. In any case it is a poor choice of throwaway line.

Once over that, there is a lot to like about this book. While it is entirely Windows-centered, so middle of the road it might well be the white line, and reliant on such routine applications as Outlook Express for its examples, it is incredibly detailed on not just what to do but why you do it.

It also has a huge number of screenshots, mainly showing the various dialog boxes and the options you need to set. Given the overabundance of dialogs in most Windows wizards, the screenshot barrage is probably overkill for many readers. Taken together with the highly approachable language and writing style, though, this makes for a book that is perfect for the absolute beginner to networking.

The drawback of the routine, middle-of-the-road approach is that the average person will quickly outgrow this book. Once you decide to use Firefox instead of Explorer and Eudora instead of Outlook, or perhaps integrate a Linux box or Mac into your home network, then this book is much less helpful.

Within its own limits though, it does cover all the bases in home networking, from connecting via dial-up or through broadband connections to building a wireless home network with shared files and printers. The authors do it in a slow, methodical manner with lots of screen shots and a great deal of explanation.

Part I covers the basics; terminology and connecting to the net. Part II covers a simple home network and file and printer sharing before finishing with broadband connections. Part III takes the network wireless. Part IV covers network security, before the final part covers more esoteric network issues such as IP telephony, media nets and gaming.

The book features frequent interjections from the computer help guys at Geek Squad. While most of these are simplistic, they often contain good advice for the uninitiated. This is a pretty good idea; it allows for some external expertise and works well quite a lot of the time, though some of the interjections came across as a little trite.

If you go to the book page at Cisco Press (which isn't, by the way, at the URL the authors give in the Introduction of the book) you can see a table of contents and an example chapter. The authors have also provided four appendices online; one devoted to binary and hexadecimal numbers, one on MAC address locking for wireless, a shameless plug for the Linksys product line, and a final one devoted to some fairly useless prognostication called "Future Stuff." All in all, I'm not sure they are a totally worthwhile addition to the book; the second on MAC address locking could have been easily added to the book if the editing had been a little tighter.

This is an almost perfect book on home networking for the person who has a Windows computer or two (and nothing else) and knows nothing. It pains me to admit that I have a number of friends who fall into this category and I would have no hesitation in lending them a copy of this book. Given the cost, I'm not sure I'd recommend this book to everyone, but I do feel that it is the perfect volume for the local library; borrowing it for two weeks while setting up the home net would be the ideal solution for people like my mate Tim, who (while a pediatric specialist) has trouble hooking up a router, or the neighbours downstairs who can't properly secure a wireless network.

I give this book a nine out of ten for its target audience, the absolute newcomer, but take off two points for the error in the URL given in the introduction and the middle-of-the-road outlook.

And pay again when something stops working. And again when they get a new computer that needs to be connected to the network. Oh, and then there's also the disadvantage of having to associate with the likes of us and to invite fat and sweaty geeks to do things for you. What will the neighbors say?

Instead of buying a book, trying to do your own network, buying the wrong crap that you don't need, and getting no where, pay someone from slashdot to do it. How much simpler can it get?

Well, since we're talking about 'Linksys', *this* simple; tell them not to bother buying or setting up a router, just slap a wireless card in their PC and connect to the nearest unprotected network named 'linksys' (the two are pretty much synonymous).

Has the added bonus that they don't have to pay for Internet access (a

Let's just consider that if Slashdot was around before the network, a Slashdotter would have invented the network and then written this book on it. And yes, your computer may be turned into a giant penguin and/or coffee machine via a "Slashdotbodge" if you let them install a network, you've gotta love these guys' efforts. And as for speelling, the average Slashdotter has too much on their mind to consider spelling and grammar.

Linksys make great routers, they run linux, you can flash them and use them for a variety of things. Likewise I also love Cisco products, very reliable, always great performance. To hear that they put out a book on home networking makes me want to go buy a copy to stick on my shelf, just to show a little support for their book, and to lend out to people who need a little help setting it up.

Linksys routers are far from great. They frequently have major stability issues - try reading the lists at dlsreports.com. Random crashes are the norm, and certain features being completely broken is common. Expect a loooong time between updates as well, which is frustrating when your router keeps crashing.

For what you pay they aren't bad, but overall I feel netgear to be more solid (they have issues too, but seemingly not as many).

Try looking up the various linksys routers on dslreports.com - you'll s

As are most home routers althoug I have found the Linksys routers to be less of a problem then other brands. In fact some other brands are borderline useless. I could give specifics of at least 4 different brands from my own direct experience but the bottom line is many of them have odd quarks and frequent lockups during typical home use. I started years back with a homebrew Linux box doing NAT and rules. I changed gears and went to the home router applicance and tr

Well, if the choice is between a $25,000 integrated solution and $25,000 in software plus the cost of a PC with a wireless and an Ethernet card, I'd save money and avoid the support-time cross-vendor fingerpointing by buying the all-in-one box.

Linksys make great routers, they run linux, you can flash them and use them for a variety of things. Likewise I also love Cisco products, very reliable, always great performance.

The number one name that comes up when problems with customer owned equipment past my ISP's equipment occur, is the word Linksys. I've had people with $3000 T1 CSU/DSU/routers hook $199 Linksys pieces of **** to them and then wonder why it doesn't work and why we won't support their equipment.

I did. A government surplus machine ($20 for 400Mhz with 6GB HD, $20 for two ethernet cards) plus OpenBSD (I paid the $40, free if you want). From zero knowledge, ~1 hour setup, half of that tweaking some NAT rules that were blocking a particular VPN. Not a hiccup 6 months in.
This [drones.com] was a huge help.

I use to spend about 75% of my co-location repair work fixing Cisco issues.

Could the reason you spent 75% of your time fixing them be because 75% or more of routers are made by Cisco or Linksys? I have no idea what the numbers are, but off the top of my head I can't think of another company that makes large network routers 'n such.

I happen to have a contract with Bank of America and they use Cisco equip in ALL their branches and corp headquarters. The stuff runs 24/7 in hot rooms and has a 1% downtime. I don't know where or what kind of info you got, maybe it's hard looking at enterprise equip in mom's basement?

I can say that after having tried a new Netgear RT614 firewall router I wouldagree with you. At the advice of some friends when my old router died I bought one as a replacement... I should have paid more attention to the reviews. Most of the reviews I read reported at least one crash with this router. Anyway, I could not keep the router alive more than 30 minutes without it locking up.

I quickly replaced it with a more expensive Linksys RV042 which runs Openrp Linux [openrp.com]. Though sadly nobody appears to have

I disagree. Everything I've bought by Linksys has sucked ass. Every single goddamn router, whether it's a regular router, a wireless router, or a VOIP router have all been flaky, and they *all* need to be rebooted every week or so. I will not buy any Linksys products, either at home, or for my business. Instead, the last few I've bought have been generic, and they've worked *much* better than the Linksys.

I'm gunna have to disagree, I use a small wrt54g http://dchky.info/ap-aa.jpg [dchky.info] that lives out on my balcony - it has fallen from the 10th floor, been bricked with firmware updates more times than I can remember, rained upon, dirtied up, and there it sits, working perfectly. Uptime 44 days (mostly because I updated dd-wrt)

I live and work in the Philippines, it's not exactly cold out there either.

Have you ever been forced to program one of their routers? Gack. They must make all their money selling the courses.

As a WAN engineer who almost exclusively supports Cisco gear, 1.) I've never had to "program" one. I've only configured them. 2.) Never taken a Cisco course in my life, but I've managed to build several 50+ site partially meshed VPN networks with fully functional monitoring and security reporting, the largest of which is multinational and has been in production for over 4 years with minim

Every linux based WAP/Router combo, and my old Router/Switch combo, that I've owned has worked like a charm without fail 24/7 for years.

Out of all of the linksys cards I've used, I've had one CardBus 802.11b card develop mental issues, and one PCI wireless-g card spaz out randomly. Given the failure rates of PC hardware (high), I'd say Linksys is no worse than anyone else.

Just picking on you cause you were last... WHAT IS IT WITH AC's? I mean... if you''re gonna flame something, do it logged in. If you're afraid for your karma, maybe there's a good reason people will mod you down. Like not supporting your facts... or just being a troll in general. Sorry for this OT, but I had 4 AC's flame me... and only one person logged in.
And for the record IIRC they opened their code shortly after being bought by cisco, and cisco runs +/-90% of the major backbones. I would think the

That's not funny! A few months ago, my mom called me at night just to ask me if she did the right thing than she ordered a wifi router. She had no clue about networks, but because a colleague of her, who bought a wifi router himself, persuade her that wifi is a must have.

It's nice to see they care about newcomers, but I'd rather they invested more time and effort in their wireless products. They were a nightmare to get to work, at least they were when I tried to integrate a few notebooks into an existing WLAN using Linksys wireless cards awhile ago. Has anyone else had problems with Linksys? Back then I vowed never to use Linksys products again, but maybe they have improved in the meantime. Can anyone comment?

Their wireless print servers won't work with "multi-function" printers of any kind. I had to get escalated up to a supervisor somewhere on the sub-continent to be informed of that delightful piece of info.

And their wireless setup utility that comes with their wireless routers is a piece of crap that doens't even find their own AP's. The one that ships with D-Link WAPs is much better, except you have to be local admin for it to work on Windows.

Umm i hate to be a bother but
I have a WUSB11 v2.8 and i am currently connecting to a Linksys router so i don't seem to have the problem you are having.
(oh btw part of my job @ the CircleR is selling linksys most of the time it would be a service id =10T when the stuff comes back)

Yes, but my problem was with their broadband routers! The browser-based configuration interface used on the Linksys routers is poorly designed from a UI standpoint and it's poorly documented too. Setting up a wide-open network is a snap, but if you want to employ MAC address filtering and WEP encryption you have to search around and engage in a process of trial and error. I found myself consulting their crappy documentation repeatedly, to no avail.

Nowadays because the margins on networking hardware are so small, Netgear, D-Link, et al basically take a reference design and slap a different web interface on it. There's no differentiation in the actual software that controls the wireless portions. Updates to the software come when the chipset vendor releases updates to their customers. Then to top it off, the hardware is manufactured in Taiwan with the cheapest possible components. (I worked for a Taiwanese company making

I had a hell of a time setting up my linksys router(win & linux).But once I got it set up, it works well with both.Linux takes more time to get working.
After dealing with that I swore that I wwould never buy Linksys again.Then I read that all the other companies were the same.If anyone knows of something better,tell us about it.

It's not just linksys, almost all wireless cards suck when it comes to documentation. I almost hate to admit it, but buying Wireless networks for dummies [amazon.com] was a big aid in getting my stuff set up properly.

"Buy Netgear." It's that simple. I've had more headaches with Linksys than I care to share. From faulty power connectors to lengthy manuals. Let's face it nobody bothers to RTFM!!! I want a 1 page picture.

"I've had more headaches with Linksys than I care to share. From faulty power connectors to lengthy manuals."
Isn't that sharing your headaches/problems? Plus how is a lengthy manual a problem? Most manuals for routers and hubs are lenghty from what I have experienced. Maybe some people like the n00b networking material I guess.

I would say just the opposite. My old Netgear FR314 gave up the ghost after years of mostly flawless use where the flash memory appears to have died. I went and tried to replace it with a new Netgear RT614, thinking that in the years since that it would probably be a lot better than my old firewall. Wrong.
The new Netgear web interface would not render properly in Firefox for starters and it went downhill from there. For port forwarding, they only had a few games and HTTP in there and nothing else, and adding new entries did not work very well with Firefox.

After finally getting it configured so I could forward ports for my mail server, web server, and SSH, the router would crash anywhere between 5 and 30 minutes, and not even reboot, but just hang. Now my old Netgear would sometimes crash, but it at least had a watchdog timer and would automatically reboot, and the crashes were not that frequent, maybe once a week. This new one would crash and require me to physically power cycle it. A good firewall should not crash. The UI was also dumbed down quite a bit more than my old firewall.

After fighting it for a day I took it back to the store and replaced it with a Linksys RV042. While also being a much more expensive firewall (around $175) I found it to also be far better. Like my old Netgear, it appears to have been well built with a solid steel chasis. The new Netgear, while it looked cool, was just plastic. It has been rock solid without any hiccup since I set it up, and unlike the Netgear I could do true ACL rules, i.e. permit or deny based not just on protocol and port range, but also by IP addresses or subnets. I.e. I only want to allow SSH from a few IP addresses. I could also set logging on each ACL rule as well.

Also, I found the logging to be fairly nice as well. It supports emailing logs to me as well as logging them to the syslog daemon on my server, though I miss being able to set the time the logs were emailed on my old Netgear.

The Linksys also has IPSEC VPN support which my old Netgear also had. The new Netgear did not. While I have not yet used it, it could come in handy.

I also tried a D-Link DS-601 firewall router about a year ago but decided not to use it since the logging was better on my old Netgear. At least it didn't crash though and I think it would be more than adequate for most home users.

Now if only I could get to a bash shell on the Linksys since it is running the OpenRP [openrp.com] Linux distribution, though sadly, unlike the wireless router, nobody has bothered yet.

Anything with the word 'work' in it has to be something to be avoided at all costs.
Sure make it sound like fun adding the word 'net' to anyone.
Do we always have to learn something new all the time. Can't we blunder blindly through life. It's more fun.

Seriously, what's the big deal... Why can't I just buy a router, plug it in and have it autosetup everything I need? We've supposedly sent a man to the moon, but we can't figure something like this out? Granted I know very little about networking, but hey... Microsoft did it with windows! Oh.. wait bad example:P

Another thing, why do they always leave their wireless access points WIDE OPEN for the world to take? They should put some sort of random initial password on the installation documents.

Why can't I just buy a router, plug it in
and have it autosetup everything I need?

For the most part, you can. Most
Cable/DSL routers these days have a
reasonably secure config as the default
(admittedly with horribly insecure default
passwords, but since they only let you admin
them from the LAN side, not too much
risk there). They auto-NAT you, act as a
DHCP server, and provide about as effective
of a firewall as the average person could ask
for.

On the computer side, assuming Joe Sixpack
pretty much exclusively runs Windows - If
XP detects a network card, it configures it,
defaulting to DHCP. Thus, you literally can
just buy a NIC, throw it in your PC, and hook
it up to your shiney new Netgear/DLink/Linksys
router, which in turn goes to your cablemodem,
and poof, you have a home LAN.

Now, will this satisfy most "real" geeks?
Hell no! But except for SSH'ing directly
into my masquerading gateway from the outside,
it provides 99% of the functionality and
security.

Now, will this satisfy most "real" geeks? Hell no! But except for SSH'ing directly into my masquerading gateway from the outside, it provides 99% of the functionality and security.

The problem is that the "real geeks" in networking aren't Linux weenies. They're the equally horrid Cisco Clowns. Given to polo shirts and dockers with $300 leather loafers, prominently putting CCNA on their business cards at twice the font size of their name, turning into snobbish twits the instant they get their certificate.

why do they always leave their wireless access points WIDE OPEN for the world to take?

They leave their APs wide open because they feel the same way you do about networking...

Why can't I just buy a router, plug it in and have it autosetup everything I need?

When they expect everything to be plug and play, and then they plug things in and they work, well... they stop. If the people out there could just realize that it isn't plug and play, then they would read the next chapter of the instructi

anyway, the reason that they make the access points wide open, is to provide the low amount of configuration that you are asking for. If they were to have it secure from the start, you would have to set up the encryption key with the wireless cards, making you go through more work (and manual reading.)

... and I could not resist picking it up. From what I saw / read, it seems to be a very good book for beginners - much better than the "Dummys" series. It has some well thought out text and explanations, as well as plenty of colorful diagrams to help the novice visualize the way networking works. I think I'll buy a copy for my father (who is a little more geeky than he is willing to admit;)).

I am interested in seeing what kind of troubleshooting they cover in the book.

For a wireless network you run into a lot of problems depending on if you are using 802.11b or 'g'. A section on testing what wireless networks you will be interfereing with by putting up a wireless hub would be nice. eg. wireless remotes, phones, other APs.

I remember an MCSE's job I took over, once upon a time. He installed a server at the office without plugging it into the switch. He thought that you needed a server to do peer to peer networking. An MCSE should know better. A home user has no chance.

To my point:

You either get networking or you don't. My beer-drinking brother is still too amazed by the whole "wireless" thing to understand it. My mother will never understand what the word "network" means.

Well, you could get an old pentium 2/3 with 128mb (or more) ram and a 10gb drive for under $200 with shipping.... Don't want to start on the bsd vs linux or linux distro choice part of building a router though.

I have a D-Link DI-524 that let me do this. I use the 172.16 space for my wired house network and the 192.168.0 for the wireless portion and it works fine. I don't use DHCP on my wired network, so it's assigned a static address. It was pretty easy to do, really. Took about 15 minutes, and it's the first and only time I've mucked with wireless.

I only bought it a week ago, and it seems to work fine, but I can't speak to its longevity as a solution. It comes with an antenna that's really fragile and tha

Maybe in france, or an other european country. There a plain white line is the equivalent of the US double yellow.

The lanes are separated by "dotted" lines. The side of the road has 'longer' dots. The distance between the dots is meaningful and and when your go to the driving school (trust me it's way more difficult and expensive to get a driving license in europe), they teach you how many dots you must have between you and the previous car depending on your speed.Try to do that in the US, sometimes I'm ev

Step 1. Buy new Linksys router from best buy.
Step 2. Attempt to get the piece of sh*t working for 2 weeks.
Step 3. Throw the piece of sh*t linksys in the trash and buy some other piece of shit that has a 50/50 chance of working.

Go to storeask person who work at store for these things-Network cable-RouterBuy thingsGo homecall phone companyask for DSLget box from Phone companytrash everything but small plastic boxplug in small plastic boxplug phone cord into small hole on small plastic boxplug yellow cable into big hole on small plastic box

take yellow wireplug yellow wire into big hole on small plastic boxplug other end of yellow wire into routerplug network cable (look like yellow cable) into computer (look like big hole on small

The author of this post made one mistake many tech savvy people do. Those of us that work in the fields of information or computer technology, work with and around technology constantly. Being around technology all the time can create a false sense that some of what you know is "common knowledge." However, there is still a large portion of the masses who are computer illiterate. It sounds like Dohtery and Anderson aimed this book at complete "newbies." Thus, "simplicity" in this case is justified. While the

What actually delineate types of matter? What constitutes a new form? Is there a standard definition? If so does it allow for the weird ones like glass (which is a fluid, not a solid) and ketchup (which is that weird form in between solid and liquid, but I forget its name)?

Hell yeah, I work for geek squad, and get paid 10 dollars an hour to make corparate millions, and make the managers there thousands, I hate it. I'm starting my own local computer repair place and quitting. All this agent and precinct talk is making me sick. Computer and networking support should be left to the strong mom and pop shops.

The worst part of it is if you know what you are doing (assumes my local BB is typical) you could count 3-5 serious to "deadly" errors in about 5 minutes of listening to them talk.
That and i am certain that you need to be way to PC
to actually solve the problems
(and besides why would the door guard be wearing a GS shirt?)

MAC address spoofing is for broadband customers whose provider only "Allows" you to use one computer to access the Net. The installation guy has you run some stupid web-based software on install, which sends the MAC address back to the provider, and locks you in to having only that one PC be able to use that broadband connection. Spoofing let's the router pretend it's your PC to the DSL/Cable/whatever provider, and the router proceeds to happily... route.

From the review: "Having defined a kilobyte as 1024 bytes, the authors then define a megabyte as 1000 kilobytes. They also claim not to understand why it is 1024 rather than 1000."

The authors don't understand that both 1024 and 1000 are used, but never (by knowledgeable people), and claim not to understand why 1024?

The reviewer also noted that the URL given in the intro isn't accurate.

To check a little on my own, I clicked on the link to Cisco Press and skimmed through the sample chapter. They mentioned http://www.scopes.com/ [scopes.com] as a urban legend debunking site. (instead of http://www.snopes.com/ [snopes.com])

Not only would I not check it out of the library, but if they mailed me a free copy I'd probably chuck it in the trash.

However:The URL errors (extremely easy to check, very likely to be checked by purchasers of the book, and in widely separate places in the book) suggest that fact-checking wasn't important in the production of the book.The fact that the authors claim not to know why 1024 is a KB means that they claim a lack of fundamental understanding of computers and suggests that it would be foolish to take computer advice from them.

The authors don't understand that both 1024 and 1000 are used, but never (by knowledgeable people), and claim not to understand why 1024?

Actually both are used, but each has its own correct context.

When a hard drive manufactorer describes hard disk capacity, they use the power of 10 series, because they count the actual number of bits that their hd has, if each platter contains 480,000,000 bits, and it has 2 platters, that's 120,000,000 bytes, therefore exactly 120MB by their count.

Yes, I found your comment useful. You gave a clear and concise explanation of why it's best to use powers of 2 to measure file sizes. I haven't seen such an explanation elsewhere. Your RAM addressing description had me scribbling pictures of capacitors and switches and I'm pretty sure that, in the end, I have an atypical drawing of row and column strobes. Thanks.

Sorry. I meant to say:The authors don't understand that both 1024 and 1000 are used, but never -- by knowledgeable people -- in the same context at the same time. The authors also claim not to understand why 1024 is used.

If you completely discard my first post because of that egregious error, I think you're entirely justified.

Disclaimer: I had no editor, nor proofreader, nor co-author to check my preview, and I'm not charging $20 either. My posts are not a parallel analogy to book publishing.